Managing systems in a sustainable way has become one of the key considerations in environmental policy over the last decade. Applying sustainable management on the Belgian part of the North Sea (BPNS) is one of those challenges. It becomes clear however that a sustainable management of the BPNS faces a number of uncertainties, environmental complexity and an intense interaction between uses and their ecological impacts. Still, policy and decision makers and the users themselves, demand advice on how to manage the system in order to safeguard it and therefore themselves from deterioration in the future.

The BALANS project and the resulting report reflects a first attempt to create an instrument that allows for different policy choices to be weighed against each other.

Download the report and the annex